Causal and contrastive discourse markers in novice academic writing

Abstract

Causal and contrastive relations between adjacent or more distant segments of discourse play an important role in expressing coherence relations (Taboada 2006) in academic discourse including discourse written by university students of English. By overtly signalling how the writer intends the discourse segment that follows to relate to the previous segment(s), discourse markers (DMs), in particular those expressing causal and contrastive relations, contribute to cohesion and enhance the establishment and maintenance of coherence in academic written discourse1. While analysing a corpus of Master's theses written by non-native novice writers the author attempts to find out which DMs Czech students of English use when expressing causal and contrastive relations, whether they are able to use selected DMs correctly and, in addition, whether there are any differences in the preferences of students that accord with the fields of study - linguistics, literature and culture, and methodology - in which the Master's theses are written.